The Wrath of Kon

Dispatches, thoughts, and miscellanea from writer Jon Konrath

Tag: self-publishing

  • The Failure Cascade, revisited

    So, much like I recently did with Book of Dreams, I recently re-read my 2020 book The Failure Cascade, and made the decision to republish it. TL;DR – here: https://amzn.to/3JwiUu7 My description of this book from a long-deleted post: This is […] a bit of a departure because although it contains a few super-short flash pieces, there…

  • Book of Dreams revisited, writing un-retirement

    So, in 2021, I unpublished all of my books and stopped writing. There were a few reasons for this. Maybe there’s a post in that. Bottom line though is that I’ve been trying to get back out of that and write again. And as I do that and try to figure out what to write,…

  • Save the Cat

    I don’t think I’ve talked about Save the Cat here yet, and how I used it to structure a book. This isn’t a “learn to write so you can make millions like me” blog, so I don’t know how important or useful it is for me to document this. And spoiler alert, the book I…

  • KONCAST Episode 9: Timothy Gager

    http://koncast.libsyn.com/episode-9-timothy-gager In this episode, I talk to writer and poet Timothy Gager. He is the author of thirteen books of poetry and fiction, including his latest book of poetry, Chief Jay Strongbow is Real. He’s also the host of the Dire Literary Series in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Links from this episode: Timothy Gager: http://www.timothygager.com The Dire…

  • Writers vs. Authors vs. Scammers

    I keep thinking about the argument of writer versus author, and then saw this interesting news item about a scammer who made millions publishing junk ebooks on Amazon: http://www.zdnet.com/article/exclusive-inside-a-million-dollar-amazon-kindle-catfishing-scam/ The summary is that a guy set up a small empire publishing hack e-books about homesteading, weight loss, vitamins, healthy lotions, and whatever Whole Foods-oriented how-to…

  • Why I love analog

    After shooting some 25,000 digital photos in the last decade and a half, I finally did something I never thought I would: I started shooting film again. In a fit of boredom, I bought a Lomography Diana F+ camera. It’s a 40-buck plastic toy camera that shoots 120 roll film, with manual everything and a…

  • I do not give a god damn about the book industry

    I often get dragged into discussions about the book industry, mostly because people are too stupid to know the difference between Jon and Joe and blindly throw a @jkonrath into a tweet about how publishing is dying or some dumb company is fleecing even dumber authors who did the equivalent of paying $10,000 cash for…

  • Mandelbrot and Genre Writing

    I’ve been in the post-book-release period of my writing cycle where I don’t know what I’m doing next, and I don’t know what I should be reading, so I start poring over non-fiction, usually some junk science book.  Specifically, it’s that James Gleick book Chaos, which is about chaos theory and the butterfly effect.  I mostly…

  • Goodbye, iUniverse

    No, iUniverse isn’t going out of business.   (Well, maybe they are – I haven’t checked.)  I’ve just decided to pull my books from iUniverse. I’ve done three books with them, and the idea of print on demand radically changed my writing career.  I mean, I have not made millions from it, but prior to…

  • Self-publishing

    I’ve been thinking more about this whole self-publishing thing. Printing copies of Rumored and selling them wouldn’t be much of a paradigm shift over when I printed copies of Xenocide and sold them from my apartment. It would cost about a jillion times more – actually, it wouldn’t cost that much more, since Xenocide 5…